The Democrats Didn’t Owe Lindsey Graham a Eulogy

By Saturday night the tributes were already stacking up, and the surprise was who was writing them. Elizabeth Warren remembered a man who was “always willing to negotiate, with humor and wit.” Amy Klobuchar wrote about the twinkle in his eye when he stepped off a plane in some far-flung country. Adam Schiff, who sat across the aisle from him for years, offered that “though we did not often agree, Senator Graham was never disagreeable.” Cory Booker said he was stunned. Jaime Harrison — the man who ran against Graham in 2020 and lost by better than ten points — reached for “a conversation, a laugh, and a mutual respect for South Carolina.” Al Franken, out of the Senate for years now, chimed in warmly too. By Sunday the left had eulogized Lindsey Graham more tenderly than half of his own party.

Here is the thing I kept waiting for one of them to remember: nobody asked them to.

I’ll skip the throat-clearing. The Democratic mourning over Lindsey Graham was unnecessary. Not disrespectful for existing — unnecessary. And the further each statement traveled from “a colleague has died” toward something gushing, the more it stopped reading like grief and started reading like a tell.

I don’t come to this as a man who dances on graves. I keep a short, specific list of people I’ll speak ill of once they’re gone — the predators, the killers, the genuine monsters who spent a whole life earning the spot — and Graham didn’t make that list. Barely, but he didn’t. He was a senator I disagreed with. That’s an ordinary thing to be, and it doesn’t cancel a man’s humanity or forbid the people who knew him from feeling the hole he left. I also know the part that complicates the neat version of this: you can fight somebody at work for twenty years and still like him after the cameras cut off. Decades in the same chamber builds real bonds. I’m not questioning whether those men and women felt something. I’m questioning why so many of them felt the need to broadcast it — and whether they hear how it lands with the people they’re supposed to be fighting for.

Because the record is right there, and it isn’t subtle.

Graham arrived in Washington in 1995 as a congressman and moved up to the Senate in 2003, and for the better part of thirty years he was one of the most reliably hawkish figures in American politics — the one people joked never met a war he didn’t want to send somebody else’s children to fight. But war wasn’t the only thing he was steady on. He was steady in the way, too. In 2017 he put his own name on a healthcare bill, Graham-Cassidy, that independent analysts estimated would have knocked roughly 21 million more Americans off their insurance. In 2021 he went on record “very pleased” that a $15 minimum wage had been stripped out of a pandemic relief package, at a moment when people were burying relatives and coming up short on rent. Healthcare, a living wage, relief, civil rights, the courts — again and again he was the door that stayed shut. You can admire a man’s manners and still tally the people left standing on the wrong side of his votes.

And then there’s the chapter his eulogists know cold, because they watched it unfold live. In December 2015, Graham looked into a CNN camera and called Donald Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic bigot,” then went further: “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit for office.” That same summer Trump had stood at a rally in Bluffton, South Carolina, read Graham’s personal cell phone number aloud to a crowd on live television, and Graham smiled through it. On January 6, 2021, with the Capitol barely cleared, he stood on the Senate floor and said “count me out — enough is enough.” Four months later he was back in the fold, explaining that the party “can’t grow without him.” He made his peace with the man who had mocked John McCain’s war record — McCain, the closest friend he had in that building — and he kept making it, all the way to the end.

That is not the life story an opposition party needed to canonize on a Saturday night. A single line would have carried it. Condolences to his family. Full stop. Instead we got paragraphs, and the paragraphs are the trouble, because they hand every cynical voter in the country the exact receipt they’ve been waving for years: that too many Democrats are more at home in the club than they are in the fight for the people who sent them there. That the collegiality is ironclad and the fighting is optional. You don’t have to manufacture that suspicion. The morning after, Common Dreams ran the reaction under one word — “nauseating.” Ordinary people felt it before a single columnist typed it up.

My mother had a line for moments like this one. Keeping your mouth shut, she’d say, is FREE — it has never once cost you a thing. There is not a single constituent in South Carolina or anywhere else sitting by a television wondering whether their senator found something lovely to say about Lindsey Graham. They’re wondering about their premiums. Their rent. Whether anybody with real power is in their corner or just performing the look of it between fundraisers. Silence, in that light, isn’t cowardice. Some days it’s the most honest thing a person’s got.

So this is what I’d hand the people who spent the weekend reaching for the warmest words they could find about a man who spent his career making sure the warmth never reached you: learn the difference between the moment to stand up and speak and the moment to let quiet do the work. Whatever else you want to say about Graham, he always knew exactly when to hold a line. His mourners could stand to learn the same trick — and they could start on the days their voters are actually watching.

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